Most conversations about cleaning up the colour industry begin with clothing, and for good reason. Dyeing and finishing fabric is one of the largest industrial sources of water pollution: one widely cited figure, from the UN Environment Programme, puts it at close to a fifth of the global total. It produces vast volumes of contaminated wastewater and is a significant source of carbon emissions. Treating that water is expensive, and some of the chemicals involved cannot be removed by conventional treatment plants at all. So when a river in India, Bangladesh or China runs the colour of the season’s trend, the damage is impossible to ignore.
But textiles are only the part we see. Almost every manufactured product has colour added to it, and most of that colour still depends on chemistry developed in the nineteenth century. The first synthetic dye was made in 1856. The chemistry has been improved and expanded many times since, but the underlying approach has not.
For a long time that chemistry escaped scrutiny. Colour is only ever a fraction of a product’s weight or volume, so companies focused first on the larger, more visible parts of their impact: energy, emissions and the circularity of the bulk of what they make. They have concentrated on the areas with the clearest legislation and the most measurable progress, and done less in the parts of the supply chain that stay opaque, colouration among them.
That approach reaches its limit once you have to account for the whole product —, every ingredient and every layer that goes into it. Biodegradability, circularity and recyclability are not partial: a product either meets the standard or it does not. Partial solutions are not solutions, and that is what is finally forcing colour, and other finishing steps, onto the agenda.
The shift away from fossil-based colour is already under way
In Europe, the rules are tightening on microplastics, PFAS and packaging. The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation applies from August 2026 and will steadily raise the bar for recyclability across the European Union (EU). From 2030, packaging that cannot be recycled to a defined standard will lose access to the market, and the threshold tightens again later in the decade.
In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has moved against petroleum-based food dyes. It has revoked the authorisation for Red No. 3, pressed manufacturers to drop six more synthetic colours, and watched a growing list of states, among them California and West Virginia, pass bans of their own.
Nestlé recently removed all synthetic colours from its U.S. food and drink, and says it will do the same across its entire global portfolio by the end of 2026, a first for a major food company. An earlier example is the EU, which removed titanium dioxide, the additive behind the bright white in sweets and coatings, from its list of permitted food additives in 2022 after its safety could no longer be confirmed.
Colourants that were treated as acceptable for a century are becoming liabilities, both commercial and reputational. For many brands the question is no longer whether to remove toxic colour. It is how fast they can, and what they can use instead.
Eliminating the colourant without losing the colour
Bright, flat colour is the part most people associate with chemical dyes. A metallic finish, a pearl effect or a shimmering surface is something else again. These come from metals and minerals, sometimes working together with dyes.
These high-value effects are everywhere. They make cheap plastic look expensive and paper packaging look high-end, give car coatings their depth, and create the shimmer in cosmetics. Almost all of them come from aluminium, silicate, mica or titanium dioxide. They are also the materials regulation is squeezing hardest, the ones that complicate recycling, and the ones that carry the heaviest human and environmental cost. India supplies around 60% of the world’s mica, much of it from unregulated mines where child labour remains common. A 2018 study by the charity Terre des Hommes estimated that 22,000 children work in them.
So the companies under the most pressure are often the ones that use colour for effect, not just for hue.
Packaging is where the squeeze is sharpest, and coatings and paint need metal-free options
Metallised films and metallic finishes are a recycling problem. A thin layer of metal on plastic or paper can blind the sensors that sorting lines rely on, sending the whole pack to landfill. Design-for-recycling guidelines from industry bodies such as RecyClass now treat heavily metallised packaging as effectively unrecyclable.
That puts the metallic, foil and shimmer effects brands have leaned on for decades on the wrong side of the line. The premium look is quietly becoming a recycling liability. The real question then becomes: what will the premium colour and effects of the future be?
The same logic reaches beyond the shelf: paint is a bigger source of ocean microplastics than most people realise. A 2022 report by Environmental Action found paint to be the single largest source, ahead of tyres and textile fibres, with the colourant washing into the water along with the paint. Automotive coatings, architectural paint and industrial finishes rely on the same effect materials, none of which were designed for circularity or a low-carbon footprint. They face the same pressure on recyclability, microplastics and mined content. The need for metal-free, non-toxic effect colour in coatings and paint has become a commercial question, not only an environmental one, and there are almost no alternatives on the market today.
Nature solved this a long time ago
The answer is one nature worked out millions of years ago.
The brilliant blue of a Morpho butterfly’s wing holds no blue colourant. Instead, the colour comes from microscopic structures on the wing that scatter and reflect light so that only blue reaches the eye. This is called structural colour, and it is far more common in nature than most people realise. The sheen of a peacock’s feathers, the metallic gleam of a beetle’s shell and the flash of a squid’s skin all work the same way, with structure rather than pigment doing the work. Because the colour is built into that structure rather than added on top, it does not fade the way a dye or a mineral pigment does. And unlike the butterfly, the structure of cellulose can be tuned to make almost any colour.
This approach to colour was a scientific curiosity for a long time. It is now available at scale for industrial use. More than a decade of research into bio-inspired photonics at the University of Cambridge, the study of how nature makes colour through structure rather than chemistry, led to the founding of Sparxell, the company I founded and run.
At Sparxell, we use cellulose, a safe material found in every plant, to build those structures through a scalable process. The colour comes from the arrangement of the cellulose itself, and nothing else: not dyes, metals or minerals. Because the structures can be tuned, the same approach produces matte colour like a dye, as well as the metallic and pearlescent effects that glitter and shimmer.
That is a real shift in how colour is made at scale, and one the industry is ready to adopt. It offers a range of colours never before possible from a single plant-based ingredient, and it replaces the colour and effect materials that regulation is now catching up with.
Proven in a fast-moving, fast-to-adopt market, and now scaling
We began commercialising in fashion, and textiles in particular. It is less constrained by colour-specific regulation than food or packaging, yet unusually aware of its own impact, with standards and buyers already pushing hard on circularity and end-of-life. What manufacturers buy, in the end, is trust: adherence to standards, consistent and reliable quality, and compatibility with the equipment they already own.
In 2025 we launched the world’s first commercial plant-based structural colour inks with our manufacturing partner Positive Materials and the designer Patrick McDowell, winner of the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design. The inks ran on existing commercial production lines in Portugal and the UK, and their colourfastness was independently certified against ISO standards.
Fashion, though, is only the start. The larger opportunity for structural colour sits in packaging, paints and coatings, the sectors under the same pressure but with far fewer credible alternatives.
Others are working on the same problem. Cypris Materials, which developed structural-colour coatings and whose technology was recently acquired by the chemical manufacturer BASF, uses partially synthetic polymers to replace conventional paint.
Our approach is different: the colour comes entirely from plant cellulose. The global colourants market is worth in excess of $50 billion, and coatings and plastics account for far more of it than textile ink. We are now scaling to tonne-level production, with pilots running across the main sectors where colourants are used.
Related Articles
Here is a list of articles selected by our Editorial Board that have gained significant interest from the public:
Most attempts to clean up colour have relied on substitution. A harmful synthetic dye gives way to a less harmful one, perhaps extracted from plants or made by fermentation, but these usually cannot match the performance of synthetic dyes. And it keeps the industry tied to the same basic chemistry, without solving the end-of-life problem.
Get the material right, as structural colour allows, and the problems of scale-up, supply chain and compliance begin to resolve together.
The science is no longer the hard part. What remains is scaling up production and winning adoption, across the fast-moving sectors and the more conservative ones alike.
Our ability to draw colour from nature has shaped human experience for as long as we have made things. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, we have the chance to reshape colour itself. And there has rarely been a more urgent moment to keep the planet both clean and beautiful.
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by the authors are their own, not those of impakter.com – Cover Photo Credit: Sparxell.
